Umeevengers Phase 1: Rise of the Umeevengers

Published in

UX Old Blog

6 min readSep 29, 2021

Welcome to the Umeeverse! Are you ready to become an Umeevenger? If so, we’d like to announce Phase 1 of our testnet — Rise of the Umeevengers! This marks the start of testnet programs we will be rolling out as we continue to work towards mainnet. Below you will find all the information you need to know to get involved: details, rules, scoring, and everything else you need to know! So gear up and get your computers ready — we can’t wait for all of you to become Umeevengers!

Important Dates

Umee will accept Validator Applications for Rise of the Umeevengers: Monday, September 27th, 2021 — Friday, October 1st, 2021 at 4:00 pm UTC
Selected Validators will be announced on Wednesday, October 6th, 2021
Rise of the Umeevengers will begin on Monday, October 11th, 2021
Rise of the Umeevengers will end on Monday, November 12th, 2021
Winners will be announced at a later specified date!

Overview

To participate, you must apply to host a Validator and be selected by Umee to compete in Rise of the Umeevengers. Here is the Validator Application.
Applications will be accepted from September 27th — October 1st.
Selected validators will be posted on a public spreadsheet before the competition starts, and will be invited to a private discord channel.
There is a limit of 200 total Validators able to compete in Rise of the Umeevengers in each weekly phase.
There will be an active Validator Waitlist in the case validators in the competition are kicked for misbehavior, low performance, or inactivity.
The selected waitlisted validators will then begin their Umeevengers journey at the very beginning of the next weekly phase.

IMPORTANT: KYC is not required to be completed upfront, however, a KYC process will be required in order to receive prizes

Any prizes will only be awarded to KYC’d Validators.
The KYC process will become available later in the competition.

How will the testnet work?

Before the testnet kicks off, we’ll delegate all registered Validators the same allocation of testnet tokens on Friday, October 8th.
Once this is completed, the testnet will start on Monday, October 11th.
An onboarding guide will be granted to Validators beforehand which will include GenTx, Genesis download, and all other technical specifics required to participate.

Rise of the Umeevengers — Main Objectives

Objective 1 — Never become Jailed/Slashed

Maximum Points Per Week: 50 points
It is a Validator’s priority to ensure they are ‘never jailed’, or ‘slashed’ throughout the testnet competition.
Validators who are removed from the active validator set for poor performance or malicious behavior will be penalized each time they are jailed/slashed, by receiving no points for the week.
Validators will receive 50 points for each week they avoid becoming jailed/slashed.
Validators will receive zero points for the week if they are jailed/slashed during that week.

Objective 2 — Uptime greater than 90%

Maximum Points Per Week: 50 points
It’s also a Validator’s priority to ensure their up-time is over 90% throughout the duration of the testnet.
Validators performing with lower than 90% uptime will be penalized by receiving no points for the week.
A Validator’s % share of signed blocks, against total blocks generated by the network, will ultimately calculate their uptime value.
Validators will receive 50 points for each week completed with over 90% uptime.
Validators will receive zero points for the week if they perform with uptime ≤ 90%.

Objective 3 — Most Blocks Processed

Maximum Points Per Week: 50 points
Last but not least, Validators must ensure their dependability to the network by striving to never miss a block.
Validators that process the most blocks throughout Rise of the Umeevengers will be awarded maximum points.
The top 50 Validators per week who process the most blocks will be awarded 50 points per week.
The next top 50 Validators (Validators 51–100) will be awarded 20 points per week.
There will be a bonus reward for any Validator(s) who never miss a block throughout the entire competition!

How Rewards Will Be Calculated

Total Prize Pool:

4 Million UMEE tokens
Rewards will be distributed according to a Validators total points earned at the end of the competition.

Total Available Points through 5 weeks:

Least Amount of Times Jailed/Slashed: 250 Points
Overall Uptime %: 250 Points
Most Blocks Processed: 250 Points
Technical Support and Contributions: (No Limit, we’ll be the judges here!)

Technical Support and Contributions:

Help give insight into the competition and Umee Network, facilitate the network and validator operations, report bugs!
This includes validator metrics, Umee Network tools, dashboards, or anything that our validator community may find useful!
Also, we’ll be keeping an eye on Validator Support. That involves those who help answer validator questions under #phase-1-rise-of-the-umeevengers (which will be an invite-only channel for selected Validators) on Discord to support technical discussions.
We’d love to see what you come up with! We will have a google form available when Phase 1 starts for all contribution submissions.

Please note that contributions for this program are limited to selected validators only. We’d like to dedicate this program to the technical community to contribute network, validator toolings and technical content. That said, we’ll announce inclusive community-focused grant programs at a later date.

Scoreboard:

A leaderboard will track each Validator’s points on a weekly basis.
The leaderboard will be released in the coming days.

The Umee judging team will take into account all network events and activities that occurred during the competition, and will plan to use the leaderboard in determining final winners. In the event that the scoring policy is infiltrated at any time due to any type of affecting network event, or malicious activity, Umee reserves the right to change its scoring and reward structure at any time during or after the competition, and pick winners according to its own terms.

Prohibited Behavior / Disqualifiers

The following instances of corrupt behavior are prohibited, and will disqualify a validator from receiving any rewards:

Absolutely any attempt to manipulate the scoring system including:
Sybil attacks on the registration process
Registering / Using Multiple Accounts
Griefing attacks on validator participants
Cheating in absolutely any circumstance
Interfering with any other testnets
A KYC process will be in effect in order to stop this behavior and must be completed to receive any rewards

Attempting to use Multiple Accounts

Using multiple accounts is strictly prohibited, and any participant who attempts to use more than one account will be automatically disqualified, and banned from future testnets.

Social Engineering attacks or use of malware on other Validators

Social engineering is defined as a range of malicious activities accomplished through human interactions that use psychological manipulation to trick users into making security mistakes or give away sensitive information.
This includes activities such as phishing and malware distribution.

Exploiting application-level security vulnerabilities in Umee code

Any bugs that are discovered not in scope to Rise of the Umeevengers should be reported directly to the Umee team.

Interfering with any other testnets

This includes the current Umee betanet, which will continue to stay active for our community while Rise of the Umeevengers is live.
Rise of the Umeevengers is limited entirely to its own scope and competition.

Now that you’ve gotten this far, good luck on your Umeevenger journey. Be sure to follow the rules, be an active community member, and most importantly — be on the lookout for Phase 2. It’s going to be a battle.

About Umee

Umee is a decentralized finance (DeFi) hub that was created for cross-chain interactions between networks. As a start, Umee will create an interchain lending and borrowing platform between the Ethereum and Cosmos blockchains.